Notices by PonyPanda (ponypanda@freespeechextremist.com)

@shmibs

i mean you’re wrong

No I’m not.

@shmibs

I just had to know wtf this shit was about. I found the book and the relevant passage.

So many things that previously wouldn’t have bothered him now made his blood boil. Take the Hooters incident. Another time when he picked me up (I had begged my mother to start picking me up, but most of the time it was convenient for him and not her), we passed a Hooters restaurant. Out of the blue, my father began ranting about these horrible feminists objecting to Hooters’s practice of scantily-clad waitresses. It wasn’t crystal clear what he was so furious about. I surmised he didn’t want to be told new “rules.” At the time, Rush Limbaugh was calling women “feminazis” because they were demanding social change, equal treatment, and to not have their value judged by how they looked (and not be seen solely as sex objects). This was inconvenient, not fun, and threatening to male privilege. In Rush’s eyes, women were trying to spoil all their fun and trying to have the same power as men. This pissed Rush off, so it pissed my dad off.

I had to say something. I was sickened this was coming from my dad. I gently told him that I thought the feminists might have a point (about objectification) and asked him why that bothered him. He got so flustered and angry he threatened to pull over and have me hitchhike back to their house! I was stunned. His reaction was very hurtful to me. Though I was close to my mom, I don’t think I told her about this, because it would have upset her that he was going to make me hitchhike the rest of the way home and that would have caused a huge argument. I didn’t want that to be what my short visit was about.

The one thing I thought would never happen was that he also started knocking college. He was being told that liberal professors wickedly turned all kids into liberals. My dad had flipped 180 degrees. Who was this man who lived with my mom? He had encouraged all three of us kids to pursue and value education. From the time we were little, he made us read for an hour before bedtime each night, and the value of reading and education were pounded into us.

The painful stories I could give are endless. My older brother, at a later time when I was making the film, told me he felt like our family was coming apart.

Rush Limbaugh had turned my dad into a full-on rebel against anything that could have been interpreted as elitist or Democratic or liberal. This “liberal elitist” button that the Right pressed fed into the discomfort my father had felt in social situations as a young professional when I was growing up. Even though he’d achieved middle-class status, that vulnerable, uncomfortable poor boy who walked to school in his bare feet and the 1950s man whose status was challenged by the martini lunches with the sophisticated guys at work was still in there. Now, finally, he had found somewhere to belong. He was a prime target for demagoguery, and nothing we could do or say would change his mind about the path he was going down.

The whole premise of this book is retarded. There IS no right-wing media brainwashing people. See picrel. However… people ARE reacting to the media and it’s the institutional LEFTIST media they’re reacting to. Her father is a boomer from a boomer era where Hooters was cool. This emergent new generation of rightists in the west wouldn’t patronize Hooters… but not because of feminism.

The dad isn’t that right-wing. He just wants to grill but the world won’t leave him alone. He’s a textbook modern reactionary who wants to keep things the way he’s used to.

People aren’t becoming right-wing because there’s an elaborate and well funded media machine to make them that way. It’s the opposite.